Ferocious: A fire crew tackles the blaze that killed Mrs Taufiq and her children (Picture: HotSpot Media)

A mother and her three children were burnt to death in their own home by a gang mistakenly targeting them in a revenge attack, a court heard today.

Shehnila Taufiq, her 19-year-old daughter Zainab, and sons Bilal, 17, and Jamal, 15, all died in the blaze allegedly started by eight friends of a fitness coach who had been fatally stabbed just hours earlier.

The 47-year-old and her family had no connection to Antoin Akpom’s murder by Hussain Hussain, 19.

However, they lived two doors down from the mother of the killer’s friend Abdul Hakim, who had been involved in the fatal ‘confrontation’, jurors were told.